If the late 2010s saw hubris, paranoia, and egomania descend upon big tech, the early 2020s were something else entirely. This era saw the rise of what Tasabian and Kogan would famously identify as the adoption of 'life script theory' by large corporations: the idea that all corporations had special, rigidly defined, and perhaps tragic destinies which would shape their conduct, no matter how abstract the connection with their actual business model and activities.

Prior to the collapse of Theranos, CEO Elizabeth Holmes had bullet-proof glass installed in her office to protect her from assassination, no doubt by other biomedical companies in the industry she sought to disrupt. In an prison interview with Tasabian, Holmes disclosed that the collapse of Theranos was a strategic one, that she had determined it necessary to 'take her work back underground to stop it from falling into the wrong hands'. She further freely disclosed that it was actually her destiny to die in a rooftop nanoblade (?) sword fight with Bryan Johnson, losing her life but saving the company and teaching humanity a valuable lesson in the process ('just like Kill Bill'). She had apparently been instructed in all of this by a witch she encountered whilst hiking in Ireland, and according to Tasabian, carried herself with 'the beatific confidence of someone who knew that—whatever happened—she had already won'.

In a speech made at CES 2026, Pinterest CEO Jesse Bracewell shared this anecdote twice in a row—word-for-word and apparently without noticing—and then announced to the mostly empty room that he had 'triumphed over the bots and trolls', had 'overcome depression', and was 'functionally impossible to kill'. The audience, expecting the announcement of a new product which accounted for Bracewell's functional immortality, rose to a confused but low-intensity hysteria. The 25-minute slide deck which followed expounded Bracewell's theory that Pinterest was of crucial importance to the future of humanity, and would either 'save the world, or destroy it', but that 'whatever happens, you can't stop what is coming'. Reflecting the severity of Pinterest's assumed world-historic posture, Bracewell revealed to the audience that most of Pinterest's core engineering team had been moved to a facility located inside the sheltered remnants of a lunar lava tube, where they could 'conduct A/B testing on the Pinterest user experience whilst being radically protected from harassment and nuclear terrorism', and that Bracewell himself was living in a '(sic) modular pod module 𝖇𝖊𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖉 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝕾𝖚𝖓', controlling a 'distributed collection of eidolon metadrones which you can shoot in the head and (sic) it won't hurt me'.

To drive this point home, Bracewell (or what has since been identified as an eidolon metadrone of unknown operating principle) then withdrew a concealed 5D-printed firearm from his suit. Grinning the grin of someone about to confidently turn a gun upon himself, Bracewell turned the gun upon himself and shot himself in the head, his 'skull' violently erupting with 𝖆 𝖈𝖔𝖒𝖕𝖑𝖊𝖝 𝖋𝖑𝖚𝖎𝖉, spattering the nearest members of an audience which—truth be told—had sort of expected something like this to occur, in the generalities if not the specifics. Approximately sixteen minutes later, another Jesse Bracewell entered the auditorium, apologised for getting lost in the expo centre, and awkwardly mounted the stage. Bracewell briefly questioned the A/V personnel on how to operate the clicker to advance to the next slide, continuing his presentation where his counterpart (who according to eye-witnesses had started 'evaporating into a rainbow') had left off.